Free The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction by Robert M. Price Page B

believes in me, believes not in me, but in him who sent me!’” Again, in John 14:9-10, “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you fail to recognize me? He who has seen me has seen the Father! . . . [Or] don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” Verse 10 sounds an awful lot like back-pedaling from verse 9, as if some scribe had decided to take the Christology of the text down a peg by a bit of theological sophistry. But where to plug these passages into the evolving history of Christology? Do they attest a scaling back of an originally high Christology? Or rather an attempt by partisans of an earlier, more modest view, to rein in what are perceived as emerging exaggerations?
    A good depiction of an Adoptionist portrait of Jesus would be Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. There we behold a very human, sometimes petulant, Jesus who chafes at the weight of his sacrifice. He does not waver in his purpose, yet half his resolve is bitter resignation. He finds himself swept up in a destiny he can neither fully understand nor escape. And yet he himself is an unfathomable mystery to his enemies as well as his disciples, a “carpenter-king” larger than life as we know it.
    Other early Christians believed Christ was a divine Spirit or angel who only seemed to appear in human flesh: “sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3), “being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7). On the other hand, some passages oppose this view of Jesus: “By this [criterion] you will distinguish the Spirit of God [from its counterfeit]: every spirit [i.e., prophecy] which affirms that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not affirm Jesus [in this manner] is not from God. This is [instead] the spirit of Antichrist” (1 John 4:2-3). “Many deceivers have infiltrated the world, those who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 7). They are called Docetists (from the Greek δοκεω, “to seem”). The mildest form of Docetism merely denied that the dying Jesus suffered any pain, as in the Gospel of Peter: “And they brought two evildoers and crucified the Lord between them. But he remained silent as if he felt no pain.” Of course, this passage may mean only to depict the Stoic heroism of Jesus who would not give his foes the satisfaction of letting them see he was suffering, much like his silence in the face of interrogation (Mark 14:60-61, 15:5; Matt. 26:62-63, 27:12-14; Luke 23:9; John 19:9-10).
    A stronger form of Docetism denied that Jesus died there at all, his place being taken by another man or even by a false vision of Jesus! The Koran says, “They denied the truth and uttered a monstrous falsehood against Mary. They declared: ‘We have put to death the Messiah Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle of Allah.’ They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but he was made to resemble another for him” (4:147). Islam seems to have inherited this version from Christian converts who might have read it in the Acts of John:
    When I saw him suffering, even then I did not stand by him in his suffering. Instead, I fled to the Mount of Olives, weeping at what had come about. And when he was crucified, Friday, at the sixth hour of the day, darkness enveloped the whole earth. And at once my Lord stood in the midst of the cave, shining with radiance that lit up the whole interior, and he said, “John! To the masses of people below, I am being crucified and pierced with lances and reeds, and I am being offered gall and vinegar to drink. But to you, I am speaking, and you must listen to what I say. It was I who placed in your mind the suggestion to come up into this mountain, so you might hear those things which a disciple ought to learn from his teacher, and a man from his God!”
    And having said this, he showed me a cross of light standing erect, with a crowd gathered round the cross,